Samantha (Sam) Cole returns to her childhood home when her mother suddenly passes. In place of familiar spaces and memories, Sam finds only uneasiness and confusion. Things are missing, the environment seems unnatural, and the neighbor (Noah) is suspiciously obtuse. Isolated with these mysteries, a scavenger hunt her mom had prepared for her upcoming birthday, and rising red flags from Noah, Sam wrestles with her sanity and certainties.
In her journey to untangle the truth, she finds herself at a dangerous crossroad: How far can she trust instincts that may be clouded by grief, guilt, and desperation?
“Shudderbugs” is a psychological thriller about the strange ways we cope with loss, and the many sides of ourselves that engage in the struggle.
Where did you film, and how did this project evolve?
Upstate on a little farm town outside of Albany in the Catskills. I grew up there. They’ve [my parents] had that place for 43 years, and it says a lot to the character in the film then, too, of of just knowing and knowing all — knowing this place like the back of my hand. She’s retired now, so treasure hunts were something that got us out of the house and out on into nature and away from her, so we were sent on treasure hunts all the time; so yeah, it was it was kind of like, we went up there to just get out of Brooklyn when the pandemic started. And we, you know, weeks later we realizing it’s going to be a long haul, which is lovely. I’ve always been really close with my parents. Like this was nice. But after a few months, you’re living with your parents in isolation. So it opened up — just stewing and all my childhood memories. And I’m there with my partner. And I’m like just getting to know my parents as an adult for the first time and just all these things were kind of collectively giving us the impetus to say: We’ve avoided making anything creatively together thus far and we know we didn’t have the resources, but fuck it, we really should just try, to make something.
So Brendan started researching cameras — he’s a first AD by trade — and talking to a lot of GPs to figure out what he could feasibly learn. And then we started writing a script around kind of the type of films I love, but also what we had in front of us, what we could maximize with the constraints. And then Jamie, the editor who’s also, she’s like a voice of Joe, and she was our sound designer and she was our sound recorder. She was the only third member of the crew. She’s been a best friend for 20 years so she came up and it was just great.
I don’t know if it could have ever been like as personal or kind of felt as clear what that needed to be if we weren’t in the situation we were in with these kind of things just coursing through all of us like fear of our parents. You know, losing our parents and and then our childhood, like creeping up on us and it just — it felt like the right story to tell. It’s, it’s weird. Like I love psychological character dramas. I love psychological thrillers. Those films can maximize the medium by really putting you into like the sensory experience of the protagonist and not knowing if you can trust them and all those things I love actually. And I wouldn’t really have the means to make a film about that, but I don’t think that all these other elements would have come as naturally, and that was that was a gift to the restriction. So that was nice.
But we just didn’t know if three people could actually do it. That was the thing. It was like, OK, so we’ve been on a ton of sets. We’ve never seen one this small. We all want to learn everything. You know, Jamie’s an editor, she hadn’t been able to see that film making process. She’s usually not there. So that was exciting for her and exciting for us because we could look at footage and make sure it was gonna stitch together and like plan everything really well. But basically we just we spent six weeks plotting out shot lists, figuring out how like what Brendan could do; picking up a cinema camera with a long lens for the first time. So we had an idealistic shot list, if everything goes great, and he’s heroic, we have this, and if not, here’s like the static version on sticks that’s still interesting. And it still tells the story in a way that we can come together.
How how many days did you shoot? Did you have a set timeline or did you just say, let’s go and see what happens?
So Brennan being an AD definitely wanted to build a schedule, so we had the gear for, I believe it was like five weeks. We had a 28-day schedule. And he was like, I can’t keep us on a schedule and DP. And we also were like, with why are we sticking to a schedule? There’s nobody else we’re beholden to. This is a gear rental. So we kept planning our days very carefully with where we left off and with the order of continuity, which is really hard in a live set with my mom like constantly moving the fruit bowls. We were like, we don’t need we don’t need to stick to it, but we need to stay organized. And we ended up shooting for 44 days. Seasons were changing. We did a couple pick up days, but we just got some more of the roll shots later on then that was it.
One thing that I really want to talk about is your use of sound. At first you’re just kind of thrown into it just like Sam is, right, which I took as a reflection of the enormity of the death of her mother; and then as things start to unravel a little bit, she starts to figure things out or wants to figure things out and the sound starts to play new roles.
Sound was one of those things that you’re in the elements that we have to work with. Like, we can’t really do dialogue. We don’t really have a lot of like characters that we can develop into our story. And in this stifled moment in her life, sound would play, and it can just be such a big character in this world. For one thing, upstate New York in the summer is just swollen with sound. Crickets and birds and the morning sounds versus the evening sounds and the creaks and cracks and the coyotes that were really there: We just recorded one night that are in the film now. It is just so it’s such a real landscape that it made perfect sense to try capture it all. It also fit into just what I wanted to feel, or feeling suffocated by the elements around her.
I really wanted the panic of the situation and the overwhelmingness of her experience and how alone she was in it to feel like she was choosing; feeling suffocated by it or at least that it was playing a role in her navigation of it. It was a character for her. It was alive. And we could maximize that because that was one thing we could capture. So Jamie was out like at 6 AM, catching the weirdest bird sounds; birds that are making fun of you, those birds, they’re stalking you, those birds that are mocking you. Like she got all of those. We had very few things to record sound on because we had no hands to do it, but we had it on the camera and she had it on boom and we just tried to capture so much of that, and then she built the time into our rough cut, but she also just gave it to our composer, who was our sound designer, who then layered it up just gorgeously. We spent a long time crafting the idea of every single bug that flies through frame having its own track. I think there were 257 layers of sound.
Because everything had its own personality or had its own just little complexion; on where she was at that moment in time. And we wanted to show a journey with that, you know, when she’s getting deeper, those things are getting a little more overwhelming; or or how the music is transitioning out of the environment when she is starting to feel some of those more magical, less realistic moments, how she’s kind of like pulled into music. We built a lot of those into the score, as well, a lot of our layers from the film into the score, which whether you hear it or not, we knew it was there to just be really intentional. We had like endless time and it wasn’t costing it money, so we just really kind of deep dove into those easter eggs and trying to layer it up as much as we could.
He actually built it in Atmos, too. Just as an experiment. And we never played in any Atmos theaters, and I don’t think that that translates on platforms yet, but we really wanted to give it that life. I’m so glad that that played, and I’m so glad it wasn’t overwhelming because we also didn’t want to have it just feel like jump scares and like we were using it as a trope. Because we didn’t have anything else to tell her story with, so we did put a lot of time to that. Hopefully that worked.
And then the hiding stuff: It that was a lot of just coming again from this collision of remembering who you were as a child in this place. and feeling how you are now as an adult who’s supposed to be handling things better, but you’re feeling like you just want to hide under the covers. Or just going up into the attic, like sitting in that tiny chair and realizing how big and stupid you are. They were in this moment, just how it feels so familiar yet so far and that’s so scary, especially when you’re alone. I had a really close friend who lost her mom before the pandemic, but she told me that the following few months just felt like she was stuck in a psychological horror film because everything she felt was both out of body and in body and she just couldn’t control any of her sensory experience; which was just constantly being manipulated and outside of her control.
Would you talk a little about the dance sequence? It’s one of my favorite parts in the film.
In childhood there’s just so much imagination, and you can just take all those things that are right there that you forgot are like so lovely and weird and interesting. And so those stories and a lot of those monologues and stuff just came out of talking to my parents who were right there and remembering what it was like to grow up on this farm and those [memories] are real. But yeah, that’s like the big suit dance from Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense,” which was the first movie my parents took me too. I danced like an idiot, but there was also an aggression and a rage and a confusion and a bottled up energy there that is just needing to be released, which I thought was a really interesting way to work through that moment rather than having the fight or the tantrum more than the breakdown.
They’re also just so many different ways that we can express, you know, our overwhelming, inner fortitudes, and I thought that that was really interesting and appropriate way to do it here where no one’s watching. No one can see, who cares, right? But it also kind of showed, in an interesting way, all the layers of who she is, because we were we weren’t able to see that much of really who she was, or who she is, but there’s a little bit of silliness like in the idea of even how she’s dancing and that’s the rage of the situation she’s in and then there’s the release. Out of the catharsis of feeling her mom’s presence is there with her, and with the butterfly at the end of that scene that lands on her, and it lets her stop and lets her breathe and gives her that moment of levity.
The butterfly was a beast to capture. People thought it was CGI and I was like, do you think we have the budget for CGI? It was wild. It was written as a magical realism moment where she hears a sound in the kitchen and she goes in and a lightning bug’s just flying around the kitchen. I wanted to be an entomologist, actually, when I was little so I kind of capture a lot of bugs. I know how to do this method, but we mentioned the season. They’re only out for like a few weeks. And then it was gonna be moths that were just like circling around the light, but they die really quick. We would get them in by night and when we were about to film them it wouldn’t work.
My mom would always send me on hunts for Monarch caterpillars as a classroom [activity], so I know exactly what they look like. So after lunch we’d go hunt for the caterpillars because we wanted to capture the hatching, and we were missing the hatching — we kept missing them. We had a lot of butterfly footage, but we finally decided we actually didn’t have a clear idea of how we were gonna get it, but we were gonna hang on to the next butterfly that hatched to see what we could do. And that night, we were with our parents watching the Celtics in the living room and the butterfly hatched and Jamie was like ‘Just go put on your yellow shirt,’ the shirt that I’m wearing in the scene because they still hadn’t figured out how we would get out of the dance.
And I did, and I came down and Brendan was like, you know, throwing the lens on the camera and it was its first flight. It just landed on my yellow shirt started climbing. And if you look closely it’s a little bit out of focus. But Brendan just got it going up and he didn’t get it . . . It was like afterwards why he hadn’t caught onto why I was crying. Like nobody was like aware of you know, we were like in the scene, but it was so last minute it, was so spontaneous, and it was just one of those, like, magical moments that we could never have written. We never could have gotten that in, and we could never have expected that, but that’s one of our favorites.
And that spoke to a lot of the happy accidents that we did have with that much time and with a lot of flexibility with how we could tell the story. We all had a very clear understanding of that there’s lots of different ways to capture that moment.
What a beautiful story and moment. Thank you. Can you talk about the riddles? I was thinking about how sound plays a role as a narrator; and then her past versus her present and the escape and the hiding that play roles as narrators too. So do the riddles, and they start to direct her path every day.
Yeah, as I mentioned, they came entirely inspired by my mom. She’s such a goof, and she’s so lyrical with her language, and she is just like pun after pun after pun. And she always did it with like dark and weird riddles with lighter riddles. But even just like the rhythms and stuff — she actually wrote a children’s book that’s gorgeous and that was inspiring, and I was thinking of the rhythm of those. And I would just get up really early in the morning when she was fluttering around the kitchen and try to come up with some of the later ones. We kind of knew where in the script to place them. There was only so much that we could write in and only so many ways that we could express, in a creative way, and imaginatively, and I love those kind of things in film. It just felt like it was honestly an opportunity to go out there and really play with imagery and with a narration of sorts of her strange, kind of beautiful and very environmentally based, deep dive through this world.
This environment is gorgeous, but this landscape is also so rich and scary. And so to be guided by it through a language that I’ve thought was really fun to write, but I also just thought it would be another effective way to add some voice to things where we couldn’t really write in voice in a lot of other ways. It was my experience. It was what made my my childhood magical at many significant moments and at many scary moments and in many angry moments when I couldn’t solve the riddle and I couldn’t read the end, and so I also wanted it to be something where she was a little hesitant to finish it. Because we definitely got the note that, like, wait, why didn’t she just go for the next clue? And the next clue and the next clue? There’s something precious about it, about saving it. And about giving it the respect in the space and the time or being ready to go to the next place that her mom’s bringing her and knowing this is the last time she might be guided by that person in that presence. And so we really carefully crafted those, and I’m really glad that they worked where they did.
What’s the future for Sam, the future of the film, and future projects for you?
I think the whole film is Sam before she even faces grief, really. Like the last theme where she’s sitting there and processing it and accepting it for the first time, that’s the beginning of her real life journey with all of this. And that’s what I think we we thought was kind of so lovely is: She’ll start now. Doing things a little bit more like an adult, like a little bit more rationally, or just a little bit more basically because she’s been able to say goodbye through that messy chaotic, but necessary, process that she endured.
For the future of the film: We made this so simply and they made this with so little, but we were absolutely championed and we would not have been able to finish and carry this film where it went without Women Make Movies and the New York Foundation of the Arts, New York City Women’s Fund, and all these female centric platforms that just took a look at what we did and just gave us a chance to elevate our resources in our communities and our festivals and that was magnificent. And we are enormously grateful to that. And I I would think that’s just a big thing to note when you’re out there with like these little baby films and you just have no idea how to find your people. No cold call, no cold email or whatever ignored, especially from these fem center platforms. But a lot of women, I was just like, can I pick your brain? Like, there is an amazing community of people out there looking to help find new and different voices; to have a place to be a ripple in a current that matters — that really, really, really does matter. So I’m really grateful for that. And that meant that once we did finish the film, we could afford to go to all the festivals that we got into. So we went to 23 festivals, almost entirely as a team. We met hundreds of filmmakers who are, you know, inspirations and supportive and people are collaborators and it’s just — it was a really, really exhilarating and welcoming experience.
It’s really important, and we really need it in the indie world right now. Every step of the way took us forever, because we really did keep our team small. And we really wanted to do everything ourselves, learn everything, learn what we loved, and what we would never want to do again. We just got it out on Amazon and Apple TV. We’ll see how long it can drive out there or survive out there. And I just hope that it stays out there so that people can find it. It feels kind of like the first footprint for us as a filmmaking team that is 100% going to be doing this again. And we want everybody to have a full seat at the table and to just find a small, equally passionate group of folks who could just make something with a few more characters. We wanna keep all of the things that made this experience so satisfying and so refreshing; we want to keep all those things intact. And I think we will. So we’re writing the next one, plotting the next one. And with the same core team.
What do you hope that females and underrepresented voices take from your experience?
For this one in particular, I spent a lot of time trying to dream up the best. I wanted to capture or, I wanted to make, a groundbreaking, earth shaking; find the right idea, find the right script. I was submitting to Sundance labs and I was studying film, like a religion, but I was also just waiting. I was waiting because I assumed that I didn’t have the resources or the people or the experience that I needed to jump in. And I think that . . . I hope that people can take this as sort of a testament that: If you are passionate about getting your first voice and vision out there, it’s going to be so and it doesn’t even matter what you’re saying. Like it’s inherently distinct and it’s yours, and you just need the right people to be there to support that and to get that out there. We need to start seeing more of ourselves and more of each other in the work. And I just wish I had not waited so long to line up for something grand. Like, you go into acting class and everybody just finds the same scene and you just keep thinking that you need to find the best idea or the best nuance and that’s the thing that can make it different. And you get there and immediately realize that nobody was gonna come in with anything that was remotely the same in the first place. If you care about it, you’re going to it when when it comes to filming it. You were just automatically going to be framing that angle differently or finding that composition, creating that composition to that beat differently; if you are passionate about this, you are already so distinct in your voice that we just should be getting it out there.
We should be celebrating each other and we should be finding each other. We have access to watch each other’s work, we have resources to be championing. I know that sounds probably naïve and amateurish, but I do think that is the power of this like collective reimagining of what stories we can be telling; and what storytellers can be telling them is incredibly powerful. I know that’s what you’re doing at Cinema Femme, too, so thank you. I mean, it’s really important. It is. It always is, and especially now, and yes, we’ll get there. We’ll all get there. I’m really, really grateful that I finally tried it. And you will realize that it takes very little to go out there and learn. There’s nothing more gratifying than finding out that something you make resonates with somebody or some secret little thing that you put in there, somebody caught that. Got that. That’s the point — that we should give ourselves a chance to share it.
